What a scene at Monday’s White House restaurant-industry roundtable: Ivanka Trump and Will Guidara, Mike Pence and Thomas Keller, Sean Feeney and Donald Trump. A group of 10 restaurant executives made their case for further and longer relief efforts; the president claimed, “We’ve saved and we’ll continue to save the restaurant business.” The makeup of the food-and-beverage task force, one of Trump’s “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups,” had already been roundly criticized for its demographics—all male, mostly white—and its preponderance of chain CEOs and fine-dining chefs. But it was Feeney, the co-owner of the critically acclaimed, booked-months-out Williamsburg restaurants Lilia and Misi, who was the most befuddling presence in the room—aside from Trump, at least.
He and Trump struck a chummy note from the outset, when Feeney introduced himself by saying, “Mr. President, like yourself, I’m a New Yorker and a career changer. I was a former bond trader at Goldman Sachs, and now I own restaurants in Brooklyn.
“The immediate and coordinated response by your administration to support out-of-work employees was inspiring, and it should make us all proud to be Americans,” Feeney added.
“How did you go from Goldman Sachs to the restaurant business? How did that happen?” Trump asked Feeney later. The smiling response: “David Solomon didn’t think I was very good at bond trading.”
“I have friends that are in the restaurant—they love the restaurant,” Trump said. “There is no business they want to go into like the restaurant business.”
“We view you as one of us,” Feeney responded.
“Yeah. Well, it’s true,” Trump said.
The head-scratching encounter—who is “we” supposed to be, even?—might have evaporated into the next news cycle had Feeney not attempted to explain himself Tuesday. As he and Trump discussed, Feeney traded his Wall Street career for hospitality, and has accounted for his success in terms of the financial precision that came with that background. (He “wanted to have real-time P&L” in his restaurants, he told Bloomberg last year, adding that his restaurants had a higher-than-usual profitability margin due to his focus on the details.) He wasn’t quite so laser-like in a May 14 email to staff that Business Insider obtained, in which he brushed aside the coronavirus crisis, telling employees there was a “less than 1 in a million chance for any of us on this email to have our lives at risk by this virus.” As B.I. points out, 1 out of 526 city residents have died from a confirmed or probable case of the virus.
Feeney’s damage control on both fronts didn’t really help. Regarding his comment to Trump, he told B.I. that he was “citing the inspiration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” who is the source of his son’s middle name. “I would say the same thing to you. I would say the same thing to Michael Jordan, [Lilia and Misi chef and co-owner] Missy Robbins, my wife,” Feeney said. “During the darkest times, I just want everyone to get through this together.”
And regarding his Pollyannaish view of the pandemic, he said, “I did not mean in any way, shape, or form to downplay the severity of this pandemic—I would never do that,” adding, “And I think that everything that we’ve done would show you that that’s pretty serious. We aren’t reopening our doors until it’s safe.”
Feeney couldn’t immediately be reached for further comment on Wednesday, but the wishy-washy explanations he gave on Tuesday helped fuel more criticism. And maybe it shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise that Feeney, with his role in prominent emblems of Williamsburg luxury, would get along so cozily with other rich New Yorkers. As B.I. noted, Page Six reported in 2016 that Ivanka and Jared Kushner ate at Lilia while seated near Goldman Sachs honchos Harvey Schwartz and Pablo Salame.
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